New The Last of Us TV show image teases Joel and Ellie in action

We’ve finally been given a better look at HBO’s highly-anticipated The Last of Us TV series. 

Speaking at Summer Game Fest 2022, the show’s co-creator and executive producer, Neil Druckmann, shared a new image featuring stars Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) in action as lead characters Joel and Ellie.

The photo marks only the second official The Last of Us TV show image to be released thus far, after HBO shared a slightly less revealing teaser for the series in September last year. 

You can check out the new shot via a tweet from Druckmann’s Twitter account below, in which the writer also praised his co-executive producer on the upcoming show, Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin:

Based on Naughty Dog’s acclaimed video game series of the same name, The Last of Us TV show will chronicle the journey of wanderers Joel and Ellie as they try to survive in a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the zombie-like Infected. 

Judging by official information and images shared so far, the HBO Max series will loosely mirror the plot of the first The Last of Us game – which came out all the way back in 2013 on PS3 – though Druckmann has confirmed that some episodes will “deviate greatly” from the source material, in terms of their focus on drama over hardcore action.

We do, however, know that actors Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson – who voiced Joel and Ellie, respectively, in Naughty Dog’s original game – will be appearing in The Last of Us TV show. The pair took to the stage at Summer Game Fest 2022 to confirm their involvement, but didn’t shed any light on the characters they’ll be playing. 

As for when The Last of Us TV show will be released, the jury is still out. Early reports had suggested that the series could be arriving later this year (star Bella Ramsey even took to Instagram in January to tease a 2022 date), though HBO’s Chief Content Officer, Casey Bloys, recently revealed that it won’t be hitting screens until 2023 at the very earliest.

According to the Directors Guild of Canada, principal photography on The Last of Us TV show is due to end in June – so there’s a chance we could at least be treated to a teaser trailer in the coming months.

A peek behind the curtain 

As mentioned, the latest image from The Last of Us TV show marks only the second official look at the HBO Max series released to the public thus far – but there are plenty more behind the scenes set photos out in the wild.  

Given the popularity of Naughty Dog’s video game franchise, it’s no wonder that fans have created a slew of social media accounts dedicated to sharing news and rumors surrounding the show, and many of these forums regularly re-post images of Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in costume as Joel and Ellie. 

Check out the Twitter thread below, for instance, which shows the pair in conversation: 

Thankfully, The Last of Us TV show looks like it’ll be remaining largely faithful to its era-defining source material, and with a reported series budget of over $155 million dollars, we’re excited to see how HBO plans on bringing the harrowing story of Joel and Ellie to life – even if we’ll have to wait until 2023.